Supporting Compliance through Enhancing Internal Control Systems by Conceptual Business Process Security Modeling

The importance of Business Process Modeling (BPM) particularly in sensitive areas combined with the rising impact of legislative requirements on IT operations results in a need to conceptually represent security semantics in BPM. We define critical security semantics that need to be incorporated in BPM to aid documentation of security needs and support compliant behavior of security systems. We analyze ways to express such semantics in BPM and their possible role in designing and operating internal control systems, which ensure and document the execution of compliance-related activities. The analysis shows that there are informal, semi-formal and formal approaches to represent security semantics in BPM. We consider the informal approaches as best suited to express security objectives and their formal counterparts as best to specify security mechanisms to enforce the objectives. All three groups of approaches have the potential to enhance the expressiveness and informative value of an internal control system.